Deal Me Jacks or Better

She was alone, in the passenger's seat, with the windows up, her face screened behind a manila folder spread open like a newspaper. Her station wagon was dark and foreign, running in one low arc from bumper to bumper. The tires were wide with a low profile. Epaulettes and effects of polished aluminum decorated the fenders and doors. The interior was like shade: neither blue nor black. Clarke became nervous at the door of her car. When he rapped on the window, she shook the folder in irritation. Her husband wasn't standing by the filling pumps or in the hard plastic chairs of the cramped waiting room. Clarke rapped again. The folder remained raised. He said, "I'll drive your car into the shop for your test. But I need your consent." "Yes." Before gripping the door handle, Clarke donned latex gloves from the breast pocket of his coveralls. The console signaled and sounded when he opened the door. As he placed paper gaskets on the seat and floorboards, she spoke, "Do I have to get out?" "No." It was twenty after four. The station wagon was sitting sleek in the garage. It was the last car of the day. He could stretch out the inspection until five. Clarke stopped around the back of the station to smoke. He squatted with his back against the building; his coveralls bunched at the waist and clutched the knees. He was short and narrow with closely cropped hair above a brown, unruly beard. Sunglasses with polarized lenses straddled the crown of his head. Slunk beneath a long, garrisoning line of eucalyptus trees, the filling station served both Ostler's Valley and Kettle City. To one side, the huddled shops of Ostler's Valley, including a grocery. Then the road swayed, ascending into the close, wooded hills, the houses and parochial school stationed in the redwood and acacia groves. The windows of Ostler's Valley reflected the spread of flat ground-beyond the gas station-that supported Kettle City. In the distance, the fog dumped onto its long, drab apartment buildings. Their flesh-toned walls appeared tawny beneath dark, tarred roofs. Closer, the public school was just getting the hoary wisps. The adjacent sanitation depot was still in sunshine. Then, a quarter mile of thin two-lane road split a run of open earth and gave access back to the gas station, Clarke against the back wall. The brief back lot was spread with eucalyptus leaves, some blackened in spots of spilled lubricants or fuels. The trees above were limber in the wind. He keyed up the computer and slipped the sniffer-sensor into the tailpipe. He entered the car, leaving one boot on the ground. He turned: hair tightly fixed to her head, gray eyes, no earrings, evenly-- tanned skin that was dark about the knees and elbows. He tried to start it. Nothing. He checked the gearshift. He tried it again. He removed the key and reinserted it. As he started to exit the car, she laughed. "The door has to be shut for it to start." Clarke, further flushed, felt himself forcing the easy action of the ignition. As he imagined her across from him in a bathtub, her hairless body, he eased off and the key clicked-engine caught. He turned to her as he revved the engine. He held the accelerator halfway down, the computer monitoring the emission levels, ticking off the seconds with an electronic chime. "Where's your husband?" "Your business?" "You're right." "You might be cute underneath," she said harshly, circumscribing a full beard on her own face with a finger. There was the whish-whish of an attendant sweeping up oil-- absorbent sand in the shop. Clarke punched his timecard, also updating a receipt that he kept in his wallet. In his coveralls, he walked up to the grocery and passed it, entering a complex of four-room cottages linked by gravel paths. Eliza wasn't around. …